Q: What is Anonymous?

Hate Crimes (also known as bias motivated crimes) occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her membership in a certain social group, usually defined by race, religion, sexual orientation, disability, ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, gender identity, or political affiliation. Hate crimes differ from conventional crime because they are not directed simply at an individual, but are meant to cause fear and intimidation in an entire group or class of people. Hate crime can take many forms. Incidents may involve physical assault, damage to property, bullying, harassment, verbal abuse or insults, or offensive graffiti or letters.

In 2006 the internet saw the creation of a phantom calling itself “Anonymous”. With recruits from porn and manga boards the new built group went to town stealing passwords, hacking and crashing MySpace pages and generally being obnoxious to other netizens. Some of Anonymous didn’t want to stop there and extended their work into real life. Online and real life harassment of those perceived as “enemies” followed.

In January 2008 this group got hijacked by another breed of online criminals and gotten to form an truly international form of cyber-terrorism. “Anonymous” now focused on members and buildings of the Church of Scientology. Bomb and death threats on YouTube and other public places were followed by the firing of guns against Church buildings. One might think the situation got out of hand. Nothing further from the truth, Anonymous is now being steered by people who know exactly what they want, how to “push buttons” with with the original manga and porn freaks to set them lose to destroy a religious minority. One could say that Anonymous fails to clean its ranks from psychos and criminals but - without morals to protect it and cowardice as “party line” - is actually actively supporting terrorist activities. Freedom of Expression however ends if is expressed with firing a bullet into someone’s head. It stops to be a civil right the moment someone gets terrorized and harmed by acts of Anonymous. The joke is over since a long time and you didn’t notice. The joke morphed into something you can be jailed for. Is that so hard to understand?

Update 12 March 2008:

There is a video documentary called “Anonymous - Hate Crimes & Terrorism Directed at Scientology” which got posted on YouTube yesterday, giving all sorts of details about what Anonymous did. I checked, and this is actually a DVD which the Church is mailing out since a couple of days. You might consider this as well: